Guerrilla – Stephan Crown-Weber

January 1, 2026

Even after the janky Walmart burn phone sent alerts through cell towers either from the moment it was plugged in or checked out or grabbed from the shelf…[…]…the guerrilla drove up to Louisville, parking, as a rule, more than five blocks from a half-timbered house where a not-yet-decrepit guy with an aura of Catholic prep school and Business was reselling a snake trap. The guerilla knocked in square, squat, plastic-frame nonprescription glasses that had temporarily seemed sufficiently out of fashion. Adopted a hunch. A twang never assimilated in childhood. Proceeded to combination bookshop-cafe to simulate a bohemian errand on Bardstown Road. Scanned for patterns in the colors of passing vehicles and synchronicities amongst patrons such as square, squat, plastic-frame glasses that all at once seemed superficially cool enough again on a guy in line for coffee with a muscular frame offset by an orange-and-black Deerhunter t-shirt. The guerilla bought poetry that led the guerilla himself to wonder if liberalism was so cloudy he and all the others remained unknown eco-artists even to the Deepest State, let alone to the geologists…[…]…Never used that phone again.

Later that day the guerrilla wrote a Tumblr poem as an alibi:

Birds, towns, cities, Obamas, edges, codes, systems, lights on plane wings descending through fog to airport that turns out to be in Bardstown, Kentucky. Sleep. Planets. Trees.

Weeks later, he gave the ranger a salute before proceeding to a campsite registered for strategically under his legal name, Michael Sutton. The sky was blue, muddled by coal-plant haze and humidity that would not shift into rain for days. The contrails were dense at such a central(?) spot on the continent. Trees were starting to leaf. Second-growth maples with 150 years left and oak with perhaps 200-300 years left barring some chestnut-scale cataclysm surrounded the mud and gravel allotted to him. Snakes were housed in crates in his truck bed—hog-nosed Enya, obsidian Cryptex, etc. He plopped in place a pop-out pup tent almost instantaneously. His throat twinged at the sight of the approaching white-haired couple and leashed dog. The pair waved in blue Kiwanis International t-shirts tucked into varying shades of khaki shorts: pear body and apple body. The dog was beagle-like but ganglier. Mike went in the cab and turned off Smokey Robinson.

“Ahoy. I see from your license plate we have a new neighbor from Nelson County, Kentucky. We are your neighbors, and my wife is here to borrow a cup of sugar.” The man burst out laughing. “I’m Roger Florence.”

“And I’m Melinda—and this is Champ.”

By turns firmly and gingerly, the pair shook his non-dominant left hand held out to them—and Champ nosed him.

“I’m Mike.”

“He’s joh-king,” Melinda shrugged Midwesternly and put her hand on Roger’s shoulder. “We’re just old timers who spend too much time at Mammoth Cave NP in the spring and we thought we would poke our snoots in your business. Is it just you here?”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “A one-man retreat. Yoga.”

Roger grinned and winced. “Well, if you’re looking, we’re serving dinner over at Casa Florence.”

And Champ began to growl at the sound of rattling.

After an interlude of what passed for chaos in nature inclusive of the guerrilla affecting a nervous, searching stare, he waved them on, allowed them to walk practically out of earshot—then turned off his music so he could join them and confirm his relation to the plan for their belly system.

Perhaps the campground in that portion of Mammoth Cave National Park would have closed if the couple had not held their vigil there. Imbalance seemed passed down from the level of currencies and interstates. Delete most of (just the word?) “civilization,” and you’ve got “CIA.”

“Now, we’re just getting started,” Roger chuckled after a long story, and true to the rhythms added: “When I was deployed, US Marine Corps, my buddies and I had a saying, “In Daniels veritas. Pardon my French.”

Two shots opened up Mike. What did Florence mean? Where did Roger and Melinda get married? He socratically added he knew nothing about marriage and told the pair they were experts.

Roger just laughed and Melinda followed with: “The less said the better. Oh dear…”

Champ rubbed his snout against his hand and growled once more.

“Easy, big fella,” Roger snapped again. “He’s not a biter.”

At a little round table inside that RV, Mike sat down with them and ate chili with juicy chunks of ground beef in it that he refrained from calling a sacrifice to shared power; the urge to leave was getting stronger. Roger briefly noted “The spirit Manitou is watching over us” in a way that felt like a boy scout trying out material; he wagged a finger with a wedding ring on it some time later. “Healthcare management, that’s where you should be working. They’re the ones making the money.”

Mike claimed he was too drunk to argue.

Champ watched from the window as Roger and Mike walked down a dark gravel trail pointing fat flashlights at the ground. When they got to Mike’s campsite, the noise was all chirruping crickets and peepers.

Roger shook his hand, said the snake had been spooked by his yoga stretching, gave him a pat on the back, and left.

It seized Mike in the moonlight that whereas Roger seemed to know he was from Nelson County, his guerrilla license plate was a string of numbers without a county listed, as he dimly recalled was true of many larger Kentucky trucks. He stared at the cursive name of the used car dealership on the cab window and savored that this would only dimly lead someone with already quite a bit of knowledge of the Bardstown area to think he was in the same region. Parallels within lost dreams. The fact that each half of the couple was seventy plus but did not wear glasses. Mike engaged with the thought that weirdness was evil.

Around 6 AM, his phone vibrated by his tender neck; the alarm didn’t wake him up because he hadn’t slept.

They must have been feeding a campfire, improbably enough, when the guerrilla let out his snakes into the brush under the cover of high-blue dark. As he drove off, he waved at Roger and Melinda in the distance. They waved back. Mike looked for a paramilitary cunning in Roger’s movements beyond all Marineness but the old man mostly seemed relaxed and bulky.

It was palpable for much of the ride back that the Florences would never be famous and never be preoccupied by the fact that they were lacking this attribute despite it perhaps being at the core of why they would continue to do well enough.

****

Lightning struck the county library almost directly when Mike read the description for the Caver’s Route up a crack in Tower Rock. After a momentary brownout and a reboot of his computer, he renavigated and read: “This climb is probably the oldest roped route in the Gorge.” The symmetry was perfect. Rock climbers had sinned. Poets enmeshed in the crux of the national truth would have understood.

Mike drove out to Red River Gorge the following Wednesday.

On the way, he listened to a Christian romance from the public library: Isabel’s Faith. Intel eavesdropped from ostensibly Christian patrons whose use of the word Christian had felt like an elite euphemism for something centered around the mid-Atlantic.

The book opens with a description of a modest virgin’s sun bonnet. Isabel is engaged to a fellow Christian, a man who kisses her after proposing.

The next Sunday, with his strong arms, Otis hugged her and quickly let go.

He was relieved, driving through fog down the Bluegrass Parkway, when Otis was thrown from a horse and died. Warm tears. Restless nights flailing alone in bed. She prayed. She talked to her minister. And found solace in an older neighbor, Wilbur, who had recently lost a wife.

Ella would have a mini-college reunion by riding a horse sustainably to see him in conversation near Bardstown with a woman journalist from New York more radical than anyone on NPR, who therefore might platform him after a time of…uncertainty. This host, frail and wise with corn-straight grey hair, would speak the words “freedom fighter Mike Sutton” into a solar-powered microphone in an amphitheater built from young trees trained to grow together into a megateepee.

Not everyone is meant to be reconciled as a conservationist. Then again, his vision placed Ella on a sustainable horse. The homeless would be empowered by a bird flow, amazement in their eyes, mixed with the public’s desire to give them a chance at gardening in rainbow costumes…the sunbeams above them splitting to transfigure.

He turned off the audiobook and sang all the way to the Gorge.

When he got to the pulloff deep in the woods at 7:30 AM, two other vehicles were parked in the mist. One a burgundy Subaru Forester with an Ohio plate and multiple bumper stickers: “One light. Many windows”/ “If the arc of the universe is leading towards justice, then the future lies with women.” The other a seemingly brand-new and immaculately off-pearl-white Hyundai Santa Fe from Knoxville with just an Obama-related Hope sticker on the rear bumper that perhaps was all that was available as Obama merchandise went because the Obama ‘08 stickers were no longer for sale. He felt for a moment capable of only vegetal literalism: mountain laurel, thick and shiny and evergreen branches overhanging to form a maze of stooped routes to reach Tower Rock. A stream was tinkling and beyond the guerrilla loomed green-black hemlocks slated to be destroyed by an invasive insect. On a remossifying boulder to his left, invaders had scratched, among other messages, “DA DREEM THUGZ 1995 RAGE IN PEACE!”

Much bigger rocks were his destination. Cobalt was shaking her tail inside the backpack so he hurried as fast as could prevent twisting an ankle.

****

The guerrilla drove back up to Louisville on a Saturday. Went to a branch library and did something gross in the front seat because he was nervous. He pulled up the CIA’s website for the first time on a guest pass inside. His mind spooled with thriller catchphrases about “accessing the mainframe.” Resized the window to hide the eagle at the top of the page. This revelation was supposed to go to the true center of it, much as he suspected most of the way to the core, the Thing was bad. He looked in vain for the anonymous tip box. Almost was ready to go when a spiel emerging from the fine print alerted him that this would be the FBI’s jurisdiction. He would try to tell them: “I have been watching Mike Sutton of Bardstown, Kentucky. He is up to something beyond subCrYstAlline security(?)…I have reason to believe he has information the CIA could find interesting involving internationality, ecology/snakes, and the true CIA in the bosom of the secret South.” He had to delete many of the words before it would fit. Then the tip box went blank upon submission. All these steps were repeated. He pivoted in his chair to check out his surroundings.. A gangly tween in the next row over was pasting dozens of variations of the circular green goddess/princess Starbucks logo from an image search into a Word doc.

***

He went to Save a Lot. Went to Walmart. Eavesdropped at work: she was me and her boyfriend was the CIA. He was called Management’s Little Secret by a cosmos out of sync.

“He’s a cool guy,” someone said on their phone the next week from a parking space near the entrance to the plant floor.

On land fallow for years, his vegetable garden was lush but not enough. One day he ran out of bulk oatmeal. Made a point of listing in his phone’s notes section that he was going to Walmart. In the Walmart cereal aisle, he looked for the least oppressive option. Finally, (“after all these years”?) a woman appeared with a phone to her ear who said: “Michael Sutton…” She paused as though listening to someone on the other end. “Yes. They hired a private investigator.” She was in a sherbet-orange blouse between grandmotherly beach wear and support for the Tennessee Volunteers. Caucasian, tidy gray pony tail.

“Michael is looking for you, too,” he said in the direction of the oatmeal right in front of him.

A minute later, he had not moved. He felt too “country” in the sense of greenery. And strolled out to the parking lot. Most everyone was on display except her in the expanse of vehicles.

He sat in bed in the middle of the next morning and rolled around trying to trick his brain into falling asleep. Looked outside and for the third time saw a yellow Penske rental van pass. Mike had reason to believe they were delivering for FedEx since they had brought him a package of earthworms before. He walked out to the road. The driver came back around after five minutes. Both waved. A Virginia plate that faded into the distance.

At work he asked his supervisor Randy about vacation. Randy said he was going to Pensacola for the summer shutdown. Mike said the CIA would be proud—and Randy laughed.

Randy asked him where he was going and Mike said he wasn’t sure. As he screwed on a component later, the guerilla sensed satellites, drones, retroviruses, informants, closed-circuit cameras, and nanobots secreted and absorbed through fingerprints.

******

The guerrilla went to the public library on the first day of shutdown with the final sixteenth of some old Ritalin. In the bathroom, he let the shard dissolve on his tongue, then went out and blogged what was, in its final draft, phrased as:

Ask Obama
for the Iroquois Superamendment
for the vibratory dome
of peaceable Turtle Island
continental megareality.

The next morning around 6:30 AM from his bedroom he got a zoological whiff of the remaining captured snakes. He had fresh suspicion that the number of undiscarded snake-covering bubble crate domes under wan yellow light and heat lamps at the very least made him seem eccentric (and “minoritarian”?) enough to seem evil. Surely some ecstatic people kept mice for the express purpose of feeding snakes, even if for a time the mice had sawdust and suspended drink bottles and exercise wheels.

Certain institutionalized legends about mania came to him. He hadn’t slept the night before. Four or five hours maybe the whole week before that.

He wished he had cocaine, which felt somehow even more disqualifying on a drug test. Something sedating like lithium. I’ll kill you. Crystal shut. The homeless marching in his general direction.

******

In a secret rustic location that he wanted to believe Randy had hinted at, the guerrilla pulled out crate after crate and lifted the hatches. Snakes slithered off without apparent hesitation or nostalgia.

******

Mike had found the snakes who had previously lived with him for a year to be on balance inscrutably, standoffishly primal. He thought about inviting over someone with an impaired sense of smell to the forecourt of their old habitat. So he went out and bought a thirty rack of Natural Light. Sipped once from one can at home and made himself drip coffee. Made himself eat ramen so as not to waste away. The smell was most of what he thought about. And looked out his bedroom window, expecting Them.

He sat down at a repurposed folding card table/potluck table to write a statement in a paper diary:

“The midpoint between ‘superpowered’ technological self-parody and abandoning the path of man at The Web’s center is a different agitation…”

He grew more furious at the page and deceptions that refused to cohere within planetary totality at the moment they emerged from living-silence—for instance, that humans, dogs, and snakes should not be referred to as different species or that dog breeds should not be named. Or was it something else? He ripped the page out, burned it with a single flick of a lighter over an aluminum dust pan beginning in the secrecy of the back snake room and ending on the back patio. Mike very nearly sprinkled the ashes in a furrow between two rows laden with ripe-to-bursting cherry, Roma, and brandywine tomatoes before he hit upon on it being better to sprinkle them directly into a honeysuckle hedge between layers of spindly lateral growth. He picked tomatoes as though suddenly both himself and the mind “inside” a satellite.